I can see clearly now (Alba DVD 108)

Member Name: fjpickett

Product:	Alba DVD 108
Date:	02/01/03 (2490 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Plays everything, bargain price

Disadvantages: Badge, if that matters to you

I've never been one to hire videotapes. Perhaps it's my Scotch ancestry, but I always figured that films would come round on TV before long and could then be taped, the practical upshot of which is that my VCR watched more TV than I did, and I have a backlog of stuff that may get watched someday. Or perhaps not, now that we have a DVD player and can properly appreciate the difference in picture quality. I'll still use the VCR for time-shifting and compiling Futurama tapes, but for films, I'm now quite happy to pay the hire charge and enjoy the wonderful picture and sound quality. I might even buy the odd DVD, although there aren't that many films that bear much repetition, IMHO (Gladiator, Monsieur Hulot's Holiday and Life of Brian excepted, maybe).

Anyway, to rewind slightly, we had been thinking a bit more seriously about a DVD player since piles of the things started appearing in supermarkets for around ?100, aided and abetted by the apparent competition between BBC and ITV to produce material that made Channel 5 look like the intellectual's choice. However, I did know that the DVD player market is complicated by the existence of regions - this being the result of a wonderful piece of foot-shootery by Hollywood, who got into a big panic when DVD's were first invented and looked like being too easy to duplicate (tapes are less easy to copy in large quantities, as each has to be recorded individually at something like normal speed). They also wanted to be able to stagger the release of films around the globe, so after a bit of arm-twisting, agreement was reached that the world would be divided up into regions, 1 being the US (of course), 2 being Europe, 3 being Southeast and East Asia, 4 being Australia, the Pacific and South America, 5 being Russia, India and Africa, and 6 being China, and that DVD's and their players would be specifically coded for these areas.

This meant that, until recently, if you bought



a player here in the UK, it would only play region 2 discs. So far, so good, but if you bought discs while on holiday, or ordered them over the Internet, you might well have found them unplayable. Manufacturers of the hardware didn't like this either, as it meant producing separate machines for different parts of the world. In practice, they don't actually do this - instead they make one version and configure it for a particular region, and many are 'hackable' via the handset to play DVD's from other regions, but it is still easier to make them universal. The upshot of this is that a few players are multi-region out of the box, and even better than that, one of them is the cheapest player of the lot, the Alba 108 from Argos - see back page of the autumn catalogue (which was when I wrote this, but it has taken until now for Dooyoo to catch up!)

If you're into badge snobbery, this obviously won't do (Alba, like Bush, Goodmans and Wharfedale, used to be a respected name a generation ago, but is no longer a manufacturer at all) but if you've got more sense than money, I respectfully suggest that you put your prejudices to one side and save yourself a decent wedge. The little Alba (and it is relatively small) has all the toys - Dolby 5.1 digital and analogue sound outputs, and both Scart and standard video outputs. It can also play CD-R's and decode MP3 files, and can even play VCD's (although the latter requires a bit of undocumented button-pressing).

So what's the catch? None that I can find, and I suspect that it's all to do with economies of scale. They know these will sell by the truckload and can therefore produce enough of them to bring the cost down to a level that will make their rivals weep. I accept that it may not be particularly built to last, although I've no complaints about the standard of finish or the appearance, and the picture and sound quality are limited only by yo
ur ot
her e
quipm
ent. Get one of these and a nice big wide-screen TV and you may never go to the cinema again!

Having said that, there are still occasions when the cinema provides the best experience, but the gap is narrowing, especially when you can also enjoy some home-made food (or a take-away) washed down with your favourite tipple - not something they approve of at my local multiplex...

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I've just noticed that Dooyoo have the wrong picture and the wrong description for this model. It IS multi-region and it DOES play MP3's (and VCD's).

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Several people have asked me about the buttons to press to play VCD's. There is more than one way to do this, but the simplest I have found is to press the Goto button repeatedly as soon as you have put the VCD in the drawer (while LOAD is on the display). You should then see a menu bar appear on the screen asking for the time (it may also briefly show a VCD logo, proving that it does know about them really!). Press 1 then Enter and off you go...

This doesn't always work first time, so keep trying - it gets there in the end! I found this hack on www.dvd.reviewer.co.uk, which is an excellent site for, er, DVD reviews.

Currently (Feb 2003) Sainsbury's have the Mico Diamante 3000 for a similar price (?70). This is also a nice player, and worth checking out.

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OI! DOOYOO PEOPLE! THAT'S STILL THE WRONG PICTURE AND THE WRONG DESCRIPTION!

IF I WAS ALBA I'D SUE...

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